Software services and Web services provide a way to access software functionality that can be reused for a variety of purposes by different clients. Services are usually provided by a server or other entity and are accessed by clients remotely over a network connection, such as a local area network (LAN) or a wide area network (WAN).
Services often manage objects on behalf of a user or client. Each of these objects can be associated with metadata values that describe the object and may provide information about accessing the service. A service may offer a query application programming interface (API) that can be used by users to obtain these metadata values.
In certain situations, a user may need to access a large number of services to obtain metadata about their various objects. In these instances, querying across dozens or possibly hundreds of geographically distributed services may introduce impractical latencies required to create many network connections and aggregate the resulting responses. As such, direct query of widely distributed services is not always a scalable approach for users interacting with large number of services.